No, it's because Microsoft themselves share the "we want to control everything" mentality. For me, the main thing is that I can go to a Linux system or a Mac or an OS/2 box and use Swing and RMI, whereas I can't do that with WFC or DCOM.
WFC does indeed look like good stuff (as did AFC before it), it's just a pity that Microsoft decided not to compete with Sun in doing a portable GUI or remote object protocol if it meant that code written using those API's could work on Linux.
And how long do you think that MS's JVM is going to remain supported as part of Windows? How many more compromises in functionality do you imagine you'll have to put up with? Say goodbye to anything from Java 2, it seem.
Why should I repeat after you? I was explaining something via logic, what do I get for mindlessly chanting something?
Sun hasn't pissed all over the notion of standardizing Java. What they have pissed over is the notion of someone other than themselves having final say as to what is or is not Java, much as Microsoft has pissed over the notion of anyone else saying what Windows is. That's certainly a bit discomfiting, but the fact of the matter is, when you speak of 'ISO C++', you have to realize that the sort of linguistic features that are standardized by ISO for their C++ spec are already very firmly standardized in the Java Language Specification.
People who go on about Java standardization have never, to my satisfaction, explained what exactly they want to get out of Java standardization. When Microsoft and Compaq started going on about this over 2 years ago, they were doing it to remove Sun's power to add API's and keep Java portable and consistent.
What, specifically, would you want to see come out of an independent body standardizing Java? Is it about linguistic compatibility, like it was with C++? I can't believe this, because the language is already extremely precisely specified. Is it about getting to have input to add new features that Sun hasn't approved (like J/Direct and Delegates)? Is it about getting to have projects like Kaffe getting to say they meet some spec without having to negotiate with Sun to pass the tens of thousands of checks in the JCK? Is it about restricting Sun from adding or changing class libraries?
Java the language and Java the VM have not changed in years. The language and VM came out of the box in a much more rigorously 'standardized' form than C++ has yet attained. The problem is all of the myriad API's and class libraries that Sun is continuing to churn out. Those provide the real platform for Java code to run with, and as long as Sun is doing the community source thing, you'll always have some risk when you make your code dependent on those API's.
But if you just want to code something in Java for use in a restricted environment, Java is as standardized as you could wish for. Just grab a copy of one of the numerous Java re-implementations and away you go.
Did they? Funny, I never noticed. My application depends on Java RMI and Swing, and Microsoft never saw fit to include the class libraries for those technologies. As a result, my users use the Java plug-in on windows, which is becoming very fast indeed, thank you very much.
Also, I assume by 'fastest Java implementation of any browser' you mean 'fastest Java implementation of any browser on Windows', as Netscape on OS/2 uses IBM's very fast JVM, and IE on Macintosh can use Apple's own Macintosh Runtime for Java, which fully supports RMI and Swing.
In actual point of fact, I don't know any Java developer who ever used Microsoft J++, nor their VM. Microsoft's purpose with Java was obstructionism and diversion. Companies that really have validated Java include Sun, IBM, Netscape, Tower, Allaire, Oracle, Sybase, and the nice folks at the Blackdown organization.
I do give Microsoft credit for goosing Sun to perform better with Java, though. Sun and Netscape went in together to produce the Java Foundation Classes in rather direct response to Microsoft's AFC/WFC challenge (which itself may be seen as a response to Netscape's earlier IFC), and Sun has continued to focus on client-side Java performance to counter this Microsoft talking point.
I've spent the last 4 years doing Java development on Ganymede (see.sig). I can assure you that Java actually works really well for moderately large-scale, client-server applications. And being able to deploy the client without recompiling on Mac, OS/2, Linux, FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris, Win95, WinNT, and even HP-UX doesn't suck much, either.
Java isn't for all tastes or for all applications, but it is a very nice language with a very portable deployment environment, and it gets the job done just fine for us.
Yes, I've been using the DataHand Pro II at work on my old Samsung X-Terminal for the last 3 years, after I had problems with my hands/wrists after a couple of years of particularly intense hacking on a flat keyboard.
The datahand is nice in many respects, as you can arrange each unit into a good position for your wrists, and the load is spread out pretty well over all of your fingers. It is not a panacea, however. I've had problems using it as well.. the datahand has a tendency to keep your hands in a static position (albeit supported by the palm mounds), which doesn't do your blood circulation any good if you're diabetic like I am. Also, some of the motions you make with your fingers often (side-to-side motions), especially with your little fingers, can be a bit stressful after awhile.
Good posture and strengthening exercises is very important, if you ask me.
One thing: the datahand is absolutely terrible for games like rogue and zangband.. you have to switch to a different mode whenever you want to enter alphanumerics or do cursor movement with arrow keys, and it's just a pain. I do 90% of my work in XEmacs, and that works pretty well, however.
I don't see why anyone would gripe about OSHA issuing standards for ergonomics. There are people who know a lot about this stuff, and bad ergonomics really can be crippling over a long period of repetitive motion. I speak from personal experience, here.
Does everyone arguing against this move think that OSHA should simply not exist? That the whole labor law idea is a silly throwback to days of socialist uprisings? Come on.
People are saying these regs may cost industry 4 billion dollars a year. That sounds bad, but that's not taking into account how much may be saved in medical costs, disability, and the destruction of careers.
Amazon link, Darwin's Radio
on
Darwin's Radio
·
· Score: 1
So is Slashdot now joining the legion of web sites that make a little nookie on the side by linking to Amazon catalog records?;-)
I read Darwin's Radio a couple of months ago and found it a very engaging and well written book with an unfortunately implausible and poorly justified central hypothesis. I am very much looking forward to the sequel, however, when the problem of why the thing happened will be far less central than the cultural and societal problems that come out of it.
Greg Bear is on my list of hard sci-fi authors to pick up on sight, but I think the actual scientific plausibility of Darwin's Radio is a bit weak, for all that Greg Bear's writing does emphasize the science.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't look to finding a completely unencumbered Java environment anytime soon. The last I saw of the GNU Classpath project, it didn't look like an attempt to do much more than cover the very basics. Stuff like RMI they're not even talking about achieving compatibility with, and Swing is way way too complex (and painfully convoluted.. more and more with each release) to make recreating it in clean-room fashion very feasible, imho. If the free software community had those resources to throw at Swing, I'd imagine they could develop a GUI system that was a bit more fully specified in terms of its behavior and which would sacrifice some of the fancy UI plugging and fancy document model system in favor of reliability and behavioral flexibility.
On the other hand, Java 1.1 with AWT but without Swing is a reasonable target for a completely free re-implementation. Ganymede uses Swing quite a bit, but a lot of the major GUI components are largely Swing-independent, as they were written before Swing. The tree and table widgets used in it are not the Swing ones, for instance.
Anyway, just a digression on Christopher's always incisive comments.
I have to give a big thumbs up to Java for portability.. I've spent the last 4 years developing a framework for managing NIS, DNS, and the like in Java. The Java GUI client works fine on many UNIXes, Win95/98/NT, OS/2, and even Power Macintosh, all without so much as a recompile. It uses RMI for the client-server communications, and it works like a dream.
The only problem is that it really isn't cross-platform in the most virtuous meaning of that term.. the platform is Java, and Sun controls the platform. Things like HTML/HTTP/CGI makes for a more generic and free (libre) cross platform environment, but you can do so many things with Java that would be impossible to do in the traditional web interaction patterns.
I hope that they continue working on neural-interfacing implants at full speed.. it is insane that we have going on nearly a million people in the United States with some form of RSI symptoms as a result of too much computer use.
I want a neural tap that is connected somewhere in my arm's neural path that would let me flip a switch and disengage my sensor/motor nerves going to my hand and let me type directly into cyberspace without moving my fingers. The nerve intercept could provide the normal signals to the fingers and hand muscles to keep everything from atrophying while the direct motor control was disengaged.
Unfortunately, I think I was born about 20 years too early for this sort of technology to be of any use in my career, but I hope it happens.
Thank you, I stand corrected. Unfortunately, my client needs some network configuration parameters set, so I can't just distribute a pre-made exectuable client jar file for direct download and execution.
I already have a good deal of perl scaffolding that gets involved in the install process, though.. maybe I can set it up so that the installClient script can build a customized jar file with a customized properties resource that the user could then just run from the desktop.
In practice, requiring people to visit a web page to run my app isn't a bad thing, as it lets me make sure they always get the latest version of the client code, but I do like the idea of a simple way of running the client free-standing from the Windows desktop.
And... it's a great thing being able to take a complex server and install it on a new UNIX system without having to compile anything. It's a great thing being able to take the client and run it on any UNIX system, any 32 bit Windows system, and even on a PowerMac without having to so much as compile anything.
Java is very mature for its age. The multi-threaded server for my app is extremely robust.. even when there are bugs in my code, the server just keeps going. An individual thread may throw an exception, but the overall system keeps going no matter what. No segfaults, ever.
And I haven't seen any major speed issues.. it helps that I developed my server code on a 60mhz multiproc Sparc system and the client on a p133.. algorithms win over linear code execution speed, like they say.
With HotJava, Java is actually really good for server code. It would still be nice to be able to tell the compiler that I wanted to continually re-use a memory buffer for some purpose, but in almost all other respects Java and its class libraries are perfectly suited for robust programming in the large. The changes from 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 have indeed been somewhat jarring, but each change was noticeably for the better, and the workarounds I wrote for things that were missing in earlier versions of Java don't break under the new, so what's the problem?
Rewritten the code? The code has been continually evolving over that time. The number of deprecation warnings I get when I compile everything under 1.2.2 is very minor, and easy to fix stuff. I can't move off of the deprecated stuff yet because I still want to support compiling and running the code under 1.1.x., but if someone held a gun to my head and forced me to clean up all deprecation warnings under 1.2.2 it wouldn't take me more than a day or so to fix...
Language flux really hasn't been an issue. Since we began, inner classes were maybe introduced, but that's about it for language changes. Class libraries have changed quite a lot.. I started developing Ganymede before Swing, and so I spent a month or so developing a tree component and a month or so developing a table component, which is sort of time lost, but no one is forcing me to rip out that code now. Generally speaking, the libraries have just gotten more robust and correctly functional over time. There were some bumps when they introduced the new security model in 1.2, but the folks at Sun were very responsive to the bug reports I submitted, and everything's working fine now.
The reason to do it in Java is that Java provides so many great pieces of technology that makes the whole thing work.. a robust thread system with language-level support, portable GUI, RMI network-translucent method call support. This would have been (at least) a 300,000 line project in C++, even assuming I was able to start off with Qt or GTK back when I started. It just wouldn't have been doable.
And I had no idea it was going to get this big, anyway.;-)
I really don't agree. I've spent the last 4 years (almost) developing a large, multi-user client/server, multithreaded application in Java (see my.sig).. 170,000 lines of code so far.
This just wouldn't have been possible in C++, with the limited developer resources I have (me and a student working on the code). Java is great in many, many ways when it comes to developing robust large-scale code. There are certainly things for which Java is not the best tool, but for a lot of things, Java is a great tool.
That's great, but at least for my app there are some questions that need to be answered so that properties can be configured, and what not. For self-contained applications, you can just distributed a web page and a jar file and run it as an applet, but for complex things that need to integrate into the local environment in some fashion that doesn't work.
Does the jre support double-clicking on a.jar file on windows? It would be especially nifty if your.jar file on windows could have a custom icon that was pulled out of the jar file, but I doubt that Sun has done the work to extend the Windows shell in this way.
I remember all the neat widgets that came out because AWT 1.0 sucked so bad. And I remember how a lot of those seem to have dried up since Swing.
I don't agree. Yes, there were a lot of widgets that came out, but none of them were as rich and featureful as the Swing widgets, and it seemed like most of them were for-cost ones. I know. I wound up having to write my own tree and table widgets because there weren't any decent ones around in mid 1997 that were compatible with the GPL. Even today, if you look on www.gamelan.com, you'll see a large number of nice widgets, many of which have nice usage fees which make them impossible to use in free software.
Makes me think of the Windows software scene, where they expect you to pay $70 for a decent telnet client.
As others have said, this decision seems much more a procedural and technical thing rather than anything presaging a specific result that would be injurious to Sun.
In general, I think Sun has passed the point with Java where they would be very vulnerable to Microsoft's predations. When Sun initially licensed Java to Microsoft, Java was honestly rather weak in many areas, but Java 2 (aka 1.2), with Swing and all the many other enhancements and APIs make it much less necessary to need to drop down to an operating system to be able to develop a rich application.
It's unclear whether Sun still dreams of kicking Microsoft off the desktop to any extent, but if they do, I'd say they need to work on a rich and portable way to package and distribute Java programs.. it would be great to be able to distribute a single archive and to have an executable script activate to unpack and install the software, much like with rpm's and and with InstallSheild on Windows. It would be especially great if it was written in Java and allowed local administrators to write their own Java methods to configure the local software install logic so that they could take an operating system-generic package and install it in accordance with local practices.
I simply don't agree. I'm arguing in favor of evolution based on the evidence.. we have observed new species arising through evolutionary processes, we can see the evolutionary record in the genome of every living organism.
Bear in mind that nobody knew about DNA when Darwin developed his theory of evolution. DNA happens to have just the sort of characteristics (and the history of development recorded in the DNA has just the sort of characteristics) that would be required by the evolutionary theory, which came earlier.
DNA (or something closely like it) is required by evolution. Creation doesn't require anything, because it is in almost all cases explicitly supernatural. Given that it is, you can explain any detail by saying 'that's how God wanted it to be'. A theory that makes no predictions and can never be refuted is no theory.
I don't believe that it is best to believe in something that is wrong. Evolution is so firmly justified by all the evidence and it is such a provable mechanism that it very much appears to be right. My point was that if you are arguing against evolution you had better have a scenario which BETTER FITS THE EVIDENCE, which creationists have never had.
I always wonder why people who go on about the lack of transitional forms totally disregard the ambhibians. Aren't they transitional between fish and reptiles?
Talking about fossils is talking about gross morphology, but we see evidence of family relations everywhere when we look at the DNA.
Since DNA is passed down from parent to child down through the generations, the DNA resident in any particular organism is itself a record of that organism's ancestral past, particularly when compared to another organism.
The creationist insistence that evolutionary theory should mean that we find skeletons of half-fish half-water buffalo or the like is just silly. Really stretching it, if you ask me. Grasping at straws.
The central flaw in your post (aside from a lot of unsubstantiated facts and irrelevant points) is that you seem to think that everyone who believes evolution is believing in it in the same way that a Christian might believe in Christianity.
I believe that evolution is very well supported by mountains of evidence, and that evolutionary theory and evolutionary thinking is the best way to analyze the fascinating problems of life's arisal on earth. This is not in violation of any of the points you made.
If very good evidence is presented that there were some supernatural mechanism that facilitated it all happening then great, I'll take that evidence into account. If the evidence is strong enough and convincing enough, then I'll adopt a different understanding of biology and a different set of assumptions about how the bits that we don't yet understand thoroughly did happen.
I'm not deceived by anything unless the evidence itself is somehow being misrepresented to me. In all my reading on this subject, I've found anti-evolutionists' work to be *much* more filled with errors, misrepresentations, and even out-right lies than in any scientific exposition.
I don't trust by faith in evolution's Random Chance, because a) evolution is partly but not entirely Random.. that's what the whole natural selection thing is about, and b) because all the biological evidence is that mutations occur in a fashion that does include what we would call randomness. I was born from one of millions of sperm cells that set out to fertilize the egg cell.. the one that made it had a random assortment of genes from my father, and it made it to the egg instead of another due to randomness. Errors in transcription during fertilization and thereafter seem also to involve randomness.
This is all from the evidence. I do assume that given that all of the processes observable in the world today seem to be orderly and naturalistic in accordance with consistent laws of physics that this is true going into the past.
That's really the simplest and most reliable assumption to make.. if I start going away from the evidence and say that anything supernatural could have happened (because of course we don't have the evidence for it), then I have to admit that a huge green frog made of plasma started life on earth. Or the god of middle eastern monotheism. Can't really say, now, can I?
I'm afraid that's entirely too simplistic and convenient an exposition of the issues here. By your logic, we can't ever prove that there was gravity 5,000 years ago because we weren't there to see it. It's a question of a historical event, right? No way to prove anything, right?
Well, that's true. That's actually true. The problem is that it doesn't help us much. We could say that all of the evidence we see today and all the calculations about the past trajectory of planets, etc., are subject to falsification by God or The Devil, but while that's a lot of fun in a sophomore epistemology class, scientists generally accept the notion that the universe isn't actively out to trick us.
Evolution is supported by such an embarrasment of evidentiary riches that it is almost hard to talk about it being tested, in the same way that it's hard to talk about my having been born..
But I'll give it a go. Evolutionary theory is supported experimentally every time any biologist does any DNA sequencing of any organism's genome, it is supported experimentally by the notable fact that babies come from two parents but are not precisely like either of their parents, it is supported by the way in which fast-evolving pathogens (bacteria and viruses) react to the introduction of new antibiotics and genetic resistancies. It is supported by mathematical models that take the known facts of life (a DNA code that is transmitted with imperfections to the next generation) and run simulations on them.
There is so much evidence for the evolutionary theory that it requires a rather awesomely grand amount of evidence to the contrary to be at all convincing. If God comes down and lays it on the line to all and sunder that he's been playing with the dice every time a baby is born, or that he has been deliberately fudging the evidence that we see all around us as an intelligence test, then sure, I'll grant you the point.
And as far as forcing beliefs on others, I'm not trying to force anything on anyone.. I'm just trying to share the evidence. I'm certainly not asking you or anyone else to take anything on faith.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's because Microsoft themselves share the "we want to control everything" mentality. For me, the main thing is that I can go to a Linux system or a Mac or an OS/2 box and use Swing and RMI, whereas I can't do that with WFC or DCOM.
WFC does indeed look like good stuff (as did AFC before it), it's just a pity that Microsoft decided not to compete with Sun in doing a portable GUI or remote object protocol if it meant that code written using those API's could work on Linux.
And how long do you think that MS's JVM is going to remain supported as part of Windows? How many more compromises in functionality do you imagine you'll have to put up with? Say goodbye to anything from Java 2, it seem.
Why should I repeat after you? I was explaining something via logic, what do I get for mindlessly chanting something?
Sun hasn't pissed all over the notion of standardizing Java. What they have pissed over is the notion of someone other than themselves having final say as to what is or is not Java, much as Microsoft has pissed over the notion of anyone else saying what Windows is. That's certainly a bit discomfiting, but the fact of the matter is, when you speak of 'ISO C++', you have to realize that the sort of linguistic features that are standardized by ISO for their C++ spec are already very firmly standardized in the Java Language Specification.
People who go on about Java standardization have never, to my satisfaction, explained what exactly they want to get out of Java standardization. When Microsoft and Compaq started going on about this over 2 years ago, they were doing it to remove Sun's power to add API's and keep Java portable and consistent.
What, specifically, would you want to see come out of an independent body standardizing Java? Is it about linguistic compatibility, like it was with C++? I can't believe this, because the language is already extremely precisely specified. Is it about getting to have input to add new features that Sun hasn't approved (like J/Direct and Delegates)? Is it about getting to have projects like Kaffe getting to say they meet some spec without having to negotiate with Sun to pass the tens of thousands of checks in the JCK? Is it about restricting Sun from adding or changing class libraries?
Tell me what it's all about, please.
Java the language and Java the VM have not changed in years. The language and VM came out of the box in a much more rigorously 'standardized' form than C++ has yet attained. The problem is all of the myriad API's and class libraries that Sun is continuing to churn out. Those provide the real platform for Java code to run with, and as long as Sun is doing the community source thing, you'll always have some risk when you make your code dependent on those API's.
But if you just want to code something in Java for use in a restricted environment, Java is as standardized as you could wish for. Just grab a copy of one of the numerous Java re-implementations and away you go.
Did they? Funny, I never noticed. My application depends on Java RMI and Swing, and Microsoft never saw fit to include the class libraries for those technologies. As a result, my users use the Java plug-in on windows, which is becoming very fast indeed, thank you very much.
Also, I assume by 'fastest Java implementation of any browser' you mean 'fastest Java implementation of any browser on Windows', as Netscape on OS/2 uses IBM's very fast JVM, and IE on Macintosh can use Apple's own Macintosh Runtime for Java, which fully supports RMI and Swing.
In actual point of fact, I don't know any Java developer who ever used Microsoft J++, nor their VM. Microsoft's purpose with Java was obstructionism and diversion. Companies that really have validated Java include Sun, IBM, Netscape, Tower, Allaire, Oracle, Sybase, and the nice folks at the Blackdown organization.
I do give Microsoft credit for goosing Sun to perform better with Java, though. Sun and Netscape went in together to produce the Java Foundation Classes in rather direct response to Microsoft's AFC/WFC challenge (which itself may be seen as a response to Netscape's earlier IFC), and Sun has continued to focus on client-side Java performance to counter this Microsoft talking point.
I've spent the last 4 years doing Java development on Ganymede (see .sig). I can assure you that Java actually works really well for moderately large-scale, client-server applications. And being able to deploy the client without recompiling on Mac, OS/2, Linux, FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris, Win95, WinNT, and even HP-UX doesn't suck much, either.
Java isn't for all tastes or for all applications, but it is a very nice language with a very portable deployment environment, and it gets the job done just fine for us.
Yes, I've been using the DataHand Pro II at work on my old Samsung X-Terminal for the last 3 years, after I had problems with my hands/wrists after a couple of years of particularly intense hacking on a flat keyboard.
The datahand is nice in many respects, as you can arrange each unit into a good position for your wrists, and the load is spread out pretty well over all of your fingers. It is not a panacea, however. I've had problems using it as well.. the datahand has a tendency to keep your hands in a static position (albeit supported by the palm mounds), which doesn't do your blood circulation any good if you're diabetic like I am. Also, some of the motions you make with your fingers often (side-to-side motions), especially with your little fingers, can be a bit stressful after awhile.
Good posture and strengthening exercises is very important, if you ask me.
One thing: the datahand is absolutely terrible for games like rogue and zangband.. you have to switch to a different mode whenever you want to enter alphanumerics or do cursor movement with arrow keys, and it's just a pain. I do 90% of my work in XEmacs, and that works pretty well, however.
I don't see why anyone would gripe about OSHA issuing standards for ergonomics. There are people who know a lot about this stuff, and bad ergonomics really can be crippling over a long period of repetitive motion. I speak from personal experience, here.
Does everyone arguing against this move think that OSHA should simply not exist? That the whole labor law idea is a silly throwback to days of socialist uprisings? Come on.
People are saying these regs may cost industry 4 billion dollars a year. That sounds bad, but that's not taking into account how much may be saved in medical costs, disability, and the destruction of careers.
So is Slashdot now joining the legion of web sites that make a little nookie on the side by linking to Amazon catalog records? ;-)
I read Darwin's Radio a couple of months ago and found it a very engaging and well written book with an unfortunately implausible and poorly justified central hypothesis. I am very much looking forward to the sequel, however, when the problem of why the thing happened will be far less central than the cultural and societal problems that come out of it.
Greg Bear is on my list of hard sci-fi authors to pick up on sight, but I think the actual scientific plausibility of Darwin's Radio is a bit weak, for all that Greg Bear's writing does emphasize the science.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't look to finding a completely unencumbered Java environment anytime soon. The last I saw of the GNU Classpath project, it didn't look like an attempt to do much more than cover the very basics. Stuff like RMI they're not even talking about achieving compatibility with, and Swing is way way too complex (and painfully convoluted.. more and more with each release) to make recreating it in clean-room fashion very feasible, imho. If the free software community had those resources to throw at Swing, I'd imagine they could develop a GUI system that was a bit more fully specified in terms of its behavior and which would sacrifice some of the fancy UI plugging and fancy document model system in favor of reliability and behavioral flexibility.
On the other hand, Java 1.1 with AWT but without Swing is a reasonable target for a completely free re-implementation. Ganymede uses Swing quite a bit, but a lot of the major GUI components are largely Swing-independent, as they were written before Swing. The tree and table widgets used in it are not the Swing ones, for instance.
Anyway, just a digression on Christopher's always incisive comments.
I have to give a big thumbs up to Java for portability.. I've spent the last 4 years developing a framework for managing NIS, DNS, and the like in Java. The Java GUI client works fine on many UNIXes, Win95/98/NT, OS/2, and even Power Macintosh, all without so much as a recompile. It uses RMI for the client-server communications, and it works like a dream.
The only problem is that it really isn't cross-platform in the most virtuous meaning of that term.. the platform is Java, and Sun controls the platform. Things like HTML/HTTP/CGI makes for a more generic and free (libre) cross platform environment, but you can do so many things with Java that would be impossible to do in the traditional web interaction patterns.
I hope that they continue working on neural-interfacing implants at full speed.. it is insane that we have going on nearly a million people in the United States with some form of RSI symptoms as a result of too much computer use.
I want a neural tap that is connected somewhere in my arm's neural path that would let me flip a switch and disengage my sensor/motor nerves going to my hand and let me type directly into cyberspace without moving my fingers. The nerve intercept could provide the normal signals to the fingers and hand muscles to keep everything from atrophying while the direct motor control was disengaged.
Unfortunately, I think I was born about 20 years too early for this sort of technology to be of any use in my career, but I hope it happens.
Paranoia is a road to madness.
Thank you, I stand corrected. Unfortunately, my client needs some network configuration parameters set, so I can't just distribute a pre-made exectuable client jar file for direct download and execution.
I already have a good deal of perl scaffolding that gets involved in the install process, though.. maybe I can set it up so that the installClient script can build a customized jar file with a customized properties resource that the user could then just run from the desktop.
In practice, requiring people to visit a web page to run my app isn't a bad thing, as it lets me make sure they always get the latest version of the client code, but I do like the idea of a simple way of running the client free-standing from the Windows desktop.
Not HotJava..
Sun's HotSpot JVM on Sparc is actually really sweet.. they finally have a memory management system that can scale really well for server applications.
And... it's a great thing being able to take a complex server and install it on a new UNIX system without having to compile anything. It's a great thing being able to take the client and run it on any UNIX system, any 32 bit Windows system, and even on a PowerMac without having to so much as compile anything.
Java is very mature for its age. The multi-threaded server for my app is extremely robust.. even when there are bugs in my code, the server just keeps going. An individual thread may throw an exception, but the overall system keeps going no matter what. No segfaults, ever.
And I haven't seen any major speed issues.. it helps that I developed my server code on a 60mhz multiproc Sparc system and the client on a p133.. algorithms win over linear code execution speed, like they say.
With HotJava, Java is actually really good for server code. It would still be nice to be able to tell the compiler that I wanted to continually re-use a memory buffer for some purpose, but in almost all other respects Java and its class libraries are perfectly suited for robust programming in the large. The changes from 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 have indeed been somewhat jarring, but each change was noticeably for the better, and the workarounds I wrote for things that were missing in earlier versions of Java don't break under the new, so what's the problem?
Rewritten the code? The code has been continually evolving over that time. The number of deprecation warnings I get when I compile everything under 1.2.2 is very minor, and easy to fix stuff. I can't move off of the deprecated stuff yet because I still want to support compiling and running the code under 1.1.x., but if someone held a gun to my head and forced me to clean up all deprecation warnings under 1.2.2 it wouldn't take me more than a day or so to fix...
Language flux really hasn't been an issue. Since we began, inner classes were maybe introduced, but that's about it for language changes. Class libraries have changed quite a lot.. I started developing Ganymede before Swing, and so I spent a month or so developing a tree component and a month or so developing a table component, which is sort of time lost, but no one is forcing me to rip out that code now. Generally speaking, the libraries have just gotten more robust and correctly functional over time. There were some bumps when they introduced the new security model in 1.2, but the folks at Sun were very responsive to the bug reports I submitted, and everything's working fine now.
The reason to do it in Java is that Java provides so many great pieces of technology that makes the whole thing work.. a robust thread system with language-level support, portable GUI, RMI network-translucent method call support. This would have been (at least) a 300,000 line project in C++, even assuming I was able to start off with Qt or GTK back when I started. It just wouldn't have been doable.
And I had no idea it was going to get this big, anyway. ;-)
I really don't agree. I've spent the last 4 years (almost) developing a large, multi-user client/server, multithreaded application in Java (see my .sig).. 170,000 lines of code so far.
This just wouldn't have been possible in C++, with the limited developer resources I have (me and a student working on the code). Java is great in many, many ways when it comes to developing robust large-scale code. There are certainly things for which Java is not the best tool, but for a lot of things, Java is a great tool.
That's great, but at least for my app there are some questions that need to be answered so that properties can be configured, and what not. For self-contained applications, you can just distributed a web page and a jar file and run it as an applet, but for complex things that need to integrate into the local environment in some fashion that doesn't work.
Does the jre support double-clicking on a .jar file on windows? It would be especially nifty if your .jar file on windows could have a custom icon that was pulled out of the jar file, but I doubt that Sun has done the work to extend the Windows shell in this way.
I don't agree. Yes, there were a lot of widgets that came out, but none of them were as rich and featureful as the Swing widgets, and it seemed like most of them were for-cost ones. I know. I wound up having to write my own tree and table widgets because there weren't any decent ones around in mid 1997 that were compatible with the GPL. Even today, if you look on www.gamelan.com, you'll see a large number of nice widgets, many of which have nice usage fees which make them impossible to use in free software.
Makes me think of the Windows software scene, where they expect you to pay $70 for a decent telnet client.
As others have said, this decision seems much more a procedural and technical thing rather than anything presaging a specific result that would be injurious to Sun.
In general, I think Sun has passed the point with Java where they would be very vulnerable to Microsoft's predations. When Sun initially licensed Java to Microsoft, Java was honestly rather weak in many areas, but Java 2 (aka 1.2), with Swing and all the many other enhancements and APIs make it much less necessary to need to drop down to an operating system to be able to develop a rich application.
It's unclear whether Sun still dreams of kicking Microsoft off the desktop to any extent, but if they do, I'd say they need to work on a rich and portable way to package and distribute Java programs.. it would be great to be able to distribute a single archive and to have an executable script activate to unpack and install the software, much like with rpm's and and with InstallSheild on Windows. It would be especially great if it was written in Java and allowed local administrators to write their own Java methods to configure the local software install logic so that they could take an operating system-generic package and install it in accordance with local practices.
I simply don't agree. I'm arguing in favor of evolution based on the evidence.. we have observed new species arising through evolutionary processes, we can see the evolutionary record in the genome of every living organism.
Bear in mind that nobody knew about DNA when Darwin developed his theory of evolution. DNA happens to have just the sort of characteristics (and the history of development recorded in the DNA has just the sort of characteristics) that would be required by the evolutionary theory, which came earlier.
DNA (or something closely like it) is required by evolution. Creation doesn't require anything, because it is in almost all cases explicitly supernatural. Given that it is, you can explain any detail by saying 'that's how God wanted it to be'. A theory that makes no predictions and can never be refuted is no theory.
I don't believe that it is best to believe in something that is wrong. Evolution is so firmly justified by all the evidence and it is such a provable mechanism that it very much appears to be right. My point was that if you are arguing against evolution you had better have a scenario which BETTER FITS THE EVIDENCE, which creationists have never had.
I always wonder why people who go on about the lack of transitional forms totally disregard the ambhibians. Aren't they transitional between fish and reptiles?
Talking about fossils is talking about gross morphology, but we see evidence of family relations everywhere when we look at the DNA.
Since DNA is passed down from parent to child down through the generations, the DNA resident in any particular organism is itself a record of that organism's ancestral past, particularly when compared to another organism.
The creationist insistence that evolutionary theory should mean that we find skeletons of half-fish half-water buffalo or the like is just silly. Really stretching it, if you ask me. Grasping at straws.
Please respond intelligently.. hm.
The central flaw in your post (aside from a lot of unsubstantiated facts and irrelevant points) is that you seem to think that everyone who believes evolution is believing in it in the same way that a Christian might believe in Christianity.
I believe that evolution is very well supported by mountains of evidence, and that evolutionary theory and evolutionary thinking is the best way to analyze the fascinating problems of life's arisal on earth. This is not in violation of any of the points you made.
If very good evidence is presented that there were some supernatural mechanism that facilitated it all happening then great, I'll take that evidence into account. If the evidence is strong enough and convincing enough, then I'll adopt a different understanding of biology and a different set of assumptions about how the bits that we don't yet understand thoroughly did happen.
I'm not deceived by anything unless the evidence itself is somehow being misrepresented to me. In all my reading on this subject, I've found anti-evolutionists' work to be *much* more filled with errors, misrepresentations, and even out-right lies than in any scientific exposition.
I don't trust by faith in evolution's Random Chance, because a) evolution is partly but not entirely Random.. that's what the whole natural selection thing is about, and b) because all the biological evidence is that mutations occur in a fashion that does include what we would call randomness. I was born from one of millions of sperm cells that set out to fertilize the egg cell.. the one that made it had a random assortment of genes from my father, and it made it to the egg instead of another due to randomness. Errors in transcription during fertilization and thereafter seem also to involve randomness.
This is all from the evidence. I do assume that given that all of the processes observable in the world today seem to be orderly and naturalistic in accordance with consistent laws of physics that this is true going into the past.
That's really the simplest and most reliable assumption to make.. if I start going away from the evidence and say that anything supernatural could have happened (because of course we don't have the evidence for it), then I have to admit that a huge green frog made of plasma started life on earth. Or the god of middle eastern monotheism. Can't really say, now, can I?
I'm afraid that's entirely too simplistic and convenient an exposition of the issues here. By your logic, we can't ever prove that there was gravity 5,000 years ago because we weren't there to see it. It's a question of a historical event, right? No way to prove anything, right?
Well, that's true. That's actually true. The problem is that it doesn't help us much. We could say that all of the evidence we see today and all the calculations about the past trajectory of planets, etc., are subject to falsification by God or The Devil, but while that's a lot of fun in a sophomore epistemology class, scientists generally accept the notion that the universe isn't actively out to trick us.
Evolution is supported by such an embarrasment of evidentiary riches that it is almost hard to talk about it being tested, in the same way that it's hard to talk about my having been born..
But I'll give it a go. Evolutionary theory is supported experimentally every time any biologist does any DNA sequencing of any organism's genome, it is supported experimentally by the notable fact that babies come from two parents but are not precisely like either of their parents, it is supported by the way in which fast-evolving pathogens (bacteria and viruses) react to the introduction of new antibiotics and genetic resistancies. It is supported by mathematical models that take the known facts of life (a DNA code that is transmitted with imperfections to the next generation) and run simulations on them.
There is so much evidence for the evolutionary theory that it requires a rather awesomely grand amount of evidence to the contrary to be at all convincing. If God comes down and lays it on the line to all and sunder that he's been playing with the dice every time a baby is born, or that he has been deliberately fudging the evidence that we see all around us as an intelligence test, then sure, I'll grant you the point.
And as far as forcing beliefs on others, I'm not trying to force anything on anyone.. I'm just trying to share the evidence. I'm certainly not asking you or anyone else to take anything on faith.
That would be illogical, after all.